


Five Times Ishmael Did Not Tell Queequeg That He Loved Him, and One Time He Did; or, The Whale

by WithoutAQualmOfConscience



Category: Moby Dick - Herman Melville
Genre: Alternate Universe - 1920s, Alternate Universe - Reincarnation, Alternate Universe - Soulmates, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-07
Updated: 2020-12-07
Packaged: 2021-03-09 19:48:25
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,050
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27941786
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WithoutAQualmOfConscience/pseuds/WithoutAQualmOfConscience
Summary: "1923 or 1851 or 1760 or any time before, it doesn’t matter. The ship could be made of pure steel and still, without fail, there it would be. White as a bone, big as the moon, impossible to stop as death."Ishmael/Queequeg and the existential horror of being constantly reincarnated just to return to the boat.
Relationships: Ishmael/Queequeg (Moby Dick)
Comments: 3
Kudos: 19





	Five Times Ishmael Did Not Tell Queequeg That He Loved Him, and One Time He Did; or, The Whale

**Author's Note:**

> Written for a friend a randomly-assigned-fandom gift exchange last year. I've never read Moby Dick but I think this pairing is neat. Shoutout to Sparknotes.

**V.**

It is improper to tell a man you love him after simply having fucked him for three hours and woken up in the warmth of his arms. Ishmael knows this much. But he wants to, sincerely, if only because he knows that Queequeg is asleep and it would be safe to do so.  _ I love you _ floats in Ishmael’s mouth like an albatross on the jetstream, nowhere to land for miles around. 

There is a beam of streetlight that falls through the window. The bedroom they’ve wound up in, after a few drinks and the mutual agreement not to talk about this once they begin their jobs, is in an attic of an over-crowded hotel that was once a boarding house. The bed they share is pressed up against an A-frame slant. Outside, the sound of the ocean a constant slap-slap-slap against the marina’s walls.  _ I’ve been here _ Ishmael thinks, though he cannot remember when. Some other life, perhaps the one he’s seeking on the water. 

Who was he before now? Before 1923 in New England? Before signing up for what may be the last whaling excursion this town will see? Since the War, Ishmael has been seeking. He was somebody, he’s certain. Not quite in the way that the other men in his hometown spoke about it, mourning the selves they left in a trench in France, but in some grander way. Who was he, before he was this body? His dreams have provided no guidance but the ocean, and so he finds himself here. Here, with a man who is seeking something of his own.

When Ishmael turns, strains his neck to look at the face of the man he wants to say he loves, Queequeg’s tattoos, navy blue, blend into the darkness. He is as much shadow as he is flesh, as much unreal as real. This is fitting, Ishmael considers, pressing deeper into the man’s embrace, given that Ishmael feels the same. He listens to the water outside to fall back asleep, warm and held and not any more in love, he’s sure, than he has ever been with anyone. 

  
  


**IV.**

An adult sperm whale weighs up to 130,000 lbs, which means that the force it must generate to push itself up through the depths of 3.2k feet below the surface, and through that blue barrier, is enormous. It is a feat of nature that the whale doesn’t even know is a feat. Ishmael cannot see the water churn until Queequeg points it out, excitement in his wide eyes. “There, there!” Queequeq has rushed to the starboard. “Do you see it?”

And then, there, all at once, the disruption. The water becomes white and then grey, the huge head of a whale bursting forth and into the air, graceful as a bird. The sound of its exhalation, the powerful spout of water, seems to echo across the water. Announcement: there is nothing to parallel this creature’s strength and size, it is the monarch of its waters. 

“Incredible.” Ishmael realizes he’s been holding his breath and he exhales as another whale makes its presence known, another spout appearing and then disappearing. He can see, now, where the water has been cut by their muscle and fat, their smooth hides. Something in him twists. The longing that has brought him here is realized, again, visceral. Someone who loved this, someone who knew. Against his better judgement, he begins to cry. 

Queequeg gently places a hand on Ishmael’s shoulder. “They’re beautiful, aren’t they?”

They are, they are. Ishmael wants to explain that this is not simple sympathy, that he’s not so soft-hearted that the sight of their target makes him weep. “I feel... connected,” he says, knowing it’s insufficient. “Not to them so much but…”  _ To you _ ? The thought takes him by surprise enough to stop his crying. They swore no talk of their night together and yet. He wants to so desperately.  _ I feel connected to you, you, like the ocean, drawing me near always, you, who I dream of, you, whom the Lord has made good and brave.  _

“Humans were meant to be on the sea.” Queequeg drops his hand from Ishmael’s shoulder and settles, leaning against the railing. He looks out at the whales with fondness. His tattoos reflect the water, lines like waves and spirals like the small whirlpools that form where the whales have dove once more. His hair moves in the breeze, light and thick as seafoam but lustrous chestnut. “We have a duty to protect it.” 

“To protect the sea?” 

“Yes.” Queequeg nods seriously, eyes unmoved from the view before them. “And the air and the land. My father…” He falters, shakes his head then. “I have no idea if my father is still alive but he taught me a great deal about it, the care of the ocean.” 

“Is that why you became a sailor?” Ishmael moves closer to him. He can hear the others rushing up from below deck now, no doubt Starbuck has seen the breaching as well. They’ll have plausible deniability for standing so close, the two of them looking at the water. 

Queequeg doesn’t nod so much as tilt his head. “Maybe. In part. I became a sailor, though, really, to see the world. There was so much I knew I wouldn’t have been able to see, had I stayed home. So much I don’t know if I would have been able to do.” There is a hint of a smile there. “In a way, it was fate.” He turns and fixes Ishmael with a serious expression. “Do you believe in fate?”

_ I believe in this moment _ . Ishmael is quiet as the others join them on the bow, begin the process of setting out the harpooning vessels, but when he speaks he knows that Queequeg is listening, “I believe in a life before this one, and a life to come.” 

  
  


**III.**

The sea is not paradise, it is not the solution to everything that Ishmael wishes could be solved but it is where he belongs. He knows this, feels it in his soul. He has stopped dreaming of the sea now that he wakes upon it each morning, stopped sweating in nervous frantic energy. Months out on the ocean, now, and the only man who retains the fanaticism of the chase is their captain. Ahab rages, rocks the boat as much as any squall. It is hypnotic to watch, and more than once Ishmael has conferred in private with Queequeg about their shared fascination, the unknowns. What will happen once they do find the White Whale? What will change when they’ve cut it open and revealed, what, Ahab’s missing leg in the same condition as when it was lost? What does the man expect to find — some miracle that will right the wrongs of the universe?

There is no righting the wrongs, it seems, there is only going forward, only the pursuit. Ishmael has given many of his worries to the water the way that he’s certain he once gave his life. His skeleton wood and steel, given up, resurrected, set back on the waves. When he visits Queequeg’s bunk at night, the two of them silent as the underwater, he is certain that the only thing that will end the  _ Pequod _ ’s fantastical chase is the end of the world. 

Fedallah, whose name cannot possibly truly be Fedallah, perhaps agrees, though the two of them have never spoken plainly to each other about it. Instead, it is over breakfast, one morning when the sky is the brilliant red that it can only be on the ocean, that Fedallah foretells their recurrent doom with a casualness that makes their captain, blind to his life before, blind to the mere fact of death as extant in the world at all, laugh. “We’ve come a far way, this time, but don’t think we’ll make it out,” Fedallah has a voice that reminds Ishmael of the singular ringing of a mortar striking the ignition pin. “Two hearses, me before you, hemp…” 

Ahab waves it off with impatience. When the crew is inside, their captain's eyes are always on the windows, anxious to view the water in the open. “Nonsense so early, Fedallah.”

“And still so late.” Fedallah doesn’t care that his words are unsettling, that Queequeg especially is frowning deeply. He lights a cigarette and nods at the sun which has cast a beam on his face. Ahab’s dark shadow, at once illuminated. 

Ishmael sees him and then double of him. Him, him over himself like a projection. Ishmael’s own hands, he realizes, are double, triple. The light of the sun is too much, the sound of the water against the boat, the reeking rotting blubber of the hold, the impossible scream of a bird of a missile of a bolt of lightning. The boat has left from Bedford, from Nantucket, from Boston, from a city with no name. Ishmael is not Ishmael. Ishmael has never been Ishmael.  _ Call me _ a request for separation. What is he trying to leave behind? Who was he, before? 

“Ishmael.” Queequeg is suddenly beside him, hand on his. Ishmael sees the man’s face and nothing else. Tattoos, dark eyes, serious expression. A constant. “Are you all right?” 

It’s clear that the rest of the crew is looking at them, too, even their captain. Ishmael feels a trickle of spit creeping down the side of his mouth, a splitting pain in his head. He swallows, licks his lips. The air smells like salt and smoke, like eggs and potatoes. “I’m…”  _ I’m nothing, I’m not here, how are you not-here with me _ ? “I’m all right. Sorry.” 

“Take him to the sick-bay,” Fedallah advises, something like a smile on his face. Knowing, even. He defers to the captain with a nod of his head, “He’s been watching, of course, for the whale as we all have. Exhaustion makes fools of men.” 

“I’ll take him.” Queequeg picks up Ishmael by the arm. Ishmael allows this, lets himself be supported. 

When they are alone in the sick bay, he does not say  _ I love you _ though he feels it. He says, instead, “Fate is a miserable thing to endure, isn’t it?” 

Queequeg doesn’t reply. He runs one hand over Ishmael’s again and again, and one hand over the small wooden idol that he keeps in his pocket at all times. Ishmael has never asked but it dawns on him that of course it must be protective as much as anything. That Queequeg perhaps is protecting them both even now. He wants to ask,  _ What do you remember, about before _ but the thought that Queequeg remembers nothing is so disheartening that he merely closes his eyes. Outside, the sound of the waves. He imagines his anxiety tied to a whale diving down, down, down, to where there is no light to see it by. 

  
  


**II.**

Fedallah’s words stay with the crew. Something has come unsettled, now that the truth has been hinted at, that a corner of reality has been peeled back. Walls have been erected in their souls by a force that guides them to a single outcome. Ishmael knows, has felt it, has come to the  _ Pequod _ because of it but now, seeing it again, wants to resist it. 

“Can it be undone?” he asks Queequeg one evening. Queequeg, the only one of the voyage that Ishmael continues to trust. The only one who seems to take the unsettling prophecies and madness of the chase in stride. 

“Can what be undone?” Queequeg looks up from his book, a biography of Pythagoras of Samos. 

“Whatever we’re destined for.” 

Queequeg sits up, swings his long legs over the side of his bunk and gestures for Ishmael to join him on the floor. There is very little space in the prow berth, just enough room for the men to file single-file to and from the door, but the two sit now, their knees touching, on the hard wood. “Do you want it to be undone?” 

Where does the urge stop, the command cease? Where does one lived life fail to provide guidance for another, being lived? Ishmael hesitates at the question. “I don’t know.” 

“I’ve thrown the dice, you know. I’ve read the runes.” Queequeg half-smiles, “I know it’s silly or superstitious but…” He falls silent.

“If there was ever a ship you needn’t apologize for superstition on,” Ishmael begins, and doesn’t finish. There’s no need to. “And what do the runes say?”

There is no real silence on the ocean. There is a hum in the air, the constant chopping below them. Even in themselves, there is the sound of something in motion. Their bodies, constantly calibrating. Ishmael knows what the runes say because he has heard them before. He sees Queequeg through the fog of memory, thin-face, wide eyes, the stare of a man who knows his death is upon him. “Nothing good,” Queequeg says, now, on a boat that is not yet disemboweled. “About what you’d expect.” 

“I would undo that, then.” Ishmael leans forward. If he keeps his eyes on Queequeg, the Queequeg of now, the man with the wool sweater and the sharp focus, the man who knows the beauty of the world around them, “But not everything. Not all of it.” 

“I don’t know if you can choose, with this kind of thing.” Queequeg leans back, runs his hands through his hair. “I don’t know what’s been done before, what hasn’t been done, what we can choose to do and what we can’t. If I make a choice, how many follow it? If I don’t make that choice, is that a choice in its own way?” He shakes his head. “I envy Ahab. At least he has a single focus. All he has to do is look for Moby Dick. It’s an easy destiny.” 

“It doesn’t leave much room for error, to be certain.” And that room for error, Ishmael considers, is that the secret? Is there yet a section of wall that the angels have not built? Is there something he could do that would adjust this, save them from the deep? He was called to the sea, and for what? To die? Couldn’t the Lord have taken him on the Western front, or in the plague that followed? Couldn’t fate have swallowed Queequeg in Australia or England or any of the boats he’d sailed upon before? 

Ishmael feels the realization on him like an electric bolt.  _ You. It’s you. It’s not the sea at all _ . But before he can say it, Queequeg says, “I’m of the mind to build a coffin, just in case” and Ishmael feels his head reel. He sees himself afloat, sees what might come, and he nods. 

He doesn’t say he loves him, too afraid to test fate now, afraid that saying the words at the wrong time would alter everything. Instead he says, “One of American wood, I think.” 

Queequeg reaches out and squeezes Ishmael’s hand, knowing. 

**I.**

When the whale hits the boat, all the tonnage of it, all its fury and righteousness and inevitability, Ishmael finds his words. They come to him the moment that the body of the  _ Pequod _ rips apart, splinters like nothing. 1923 or 1851 or 1760 or any time before, it doesn’t matter. The ship could be made of pure steel and still, without fail, there it would be. White as a bone, big as the moon, impossible to stop as death. 

Everything lifts, moves in slow motion. Ishmael sees his feet one moment on the deck, the next far away from it. Near him, Queequeg is twisting in the air, arms flailing, tossed about as simply as a ball. The water is beside them, then behind them, they are perpendicular and then parallel to it. 

The whale is silent but for the sound of its blowhole, that unmistakable hiss of exertion. It is everyone else who screams, who tries to scream, who becomes lost in the action. When Ishmael hits the water, he grasps for something familiar, anything safe. Above him, the side of the  _ Pequod _ bursts into splinters. 

Cool and dark, the ocean swallows him for a moment. He could sink, he realizes, he could sink and start again. Next to him, he sees Queequeg, bleeding from his scalp, treading water with a dazed expression. “Take my hand!” The force of Ishmael’s words surprise him. “Take my hand now!” 

Queequeg does. Their fingers entwine as a shout is strangled out, the great slap of Moby Dick’s tail sending shockwaves, detonation, through their miserable wreck. Ocean everywhere. In Ishmael’s mouth, nose, eyes, choking. He holds firm to Queequeg’s hand until he’s sure he’ll lose hold, sure he’ll fall into the darkness below them. 

**0.**

They float together, on the coffin, for longer than Ishmael can keep track of. The day turns to night, to day again. Queequeg sleeps, torso draped over the wood, coughing slightly. What does the Lord have in store for them? Ishmael would pray, would ask Queequeg to toss the runes, but he feels unmoored from those solutions. There is nothing, here, now. Queequeg has never stayed with him to this point before. “I love you.” 

Queequeg stirs. His eyes open. “I’m sorry?” He’s shivering, slightly. They both are. Their bodies give up warmth to the ocean, only re-heated by the glare of the sun. 

“I said I love you.” Ishmael smiles, his lips cracked.

Queequeg makes a noise that sounds something like gratitude, then morphs into surprise. He’s looking at Ishmael and then over Ishmael’s head. “I love you, too,” he says, and then frantically points, “Look. Look!” 

It’s the  _ Rachel _ , clipping through the waters, nets out. Queequeg squeezes Ishmael’s hand so firmly that Ishmael begins to cry. The walls of fate have crumbled around them, the sea gives them up again to a future that is unknown. 

_ It was true then, when I shared your bed, now I share your coffin, we, together, survive and how strange and wonderful it is that someday we will die but that today is not that day. Today, instead, it is the day that I whisper, our bodies in the water, my words as buoyant as our little vessel soon to be saved, that I love you _ .


End file.
